A to Z 2021: A Year in “The Old Country”

lindamaycurry

When I was young the older people in the family used to refer to the United Kingdom as “The Old Country”. This is where their parents or grandparents had left England, Scotland and Northern Ireland in the mid 1800s, never to return.

This blog is about my year in England, returning to the land of my ancestors, working in a Midland’s school and living in a small semi-detached house next to a graveyard.

From a mixture of hand written notes, diary extracts and emails to friends in Australia I am compiling the definitive record of the year 2004, when I finally fulfilled a lifelong dream of leaving the security of home and embarking on the greatest adventure of my life.

This is my 6th A to Z. Previous titles were:

2016 – A for Argonaut

2017 – Fact or Fiction – Family Stories

2018 – A for Ancestry

2019 – Travels in Our Caravan

2020 – Taking the Hard Road

I look forward to sharing this year’s A to Z with you and also to reading the blogs of the many other contributors in this wonderful month of writing!

47 thoughts on “A to Z 2021: A Year in “The Old Country””

  4. Good on you Linda.

    Its good to put things in some sort of chronological order and to record as much as you can remember.

    Cheers,

    Ruth

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    1. As a lover of history I am interested to find out who your 100 year old people are. Well maybe they are no longer with us but it would have been an exciting time to live, for some anyway.

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  11. Hello Linda! What a terrific theme! I’m very much looking forward to connecting with you again through the April Challenge. This sounds as if it was quite an adventure and is a topic dear to my heart, having lived most of my life in a country far from the birthplaces of either of my parents. I’m also very interested in how you will be pulling it together.

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    1. It’s strange still feeling a connection to a place the ancestors came from so long ago. I suppose it is because our culture in Australia has been so influenced by the UK, especially when I was growing up.

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  18. As students at the University of London we’re really looking forward to your anecdotes! Quite a few of us are not from Britain, so we’re curious about whether your experience of England is similar to ours!

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  20. That’s pretty cool. I always hear “the old country” meaning Italy. But there are a lot of Italians in my area.

    J Lenni Dorner~ Co-host of the #AtoZchallenge, Debut Author Interviewer, Reference& Speculative Fiction Author

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    1. I look forward to reading your Flash Fiction stories this year. I see you don’t speak Klingon (I was a Trekkie as a teenager many decades ago) but do you speak German? That would help if you were there for a year.

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